Powerline networking with mixed Devolo and TP-LINK

We’ve been using Devolo powerline networking at home for years – we have an old house with wifi-proof walls. We’d been having plenty of problems with them, possibly due to overheating of the wifi plugs. After replacing the dLan 500 adapters with the more expensive Devolo dLan Pro adapters without any improvement, I finally decided to try TP-LINK AV500s instead.

The TP-LINKs are much cheaper (base plug plus two WLAN repeaters for < EUR 100). They are also compatible with the Devolo dLan 500s, so I’m still using a few of the Devolos (for a printer and in the cellar). Unfortunately they don’t perform better than the Devolos – I still get about 30Mbit throughput (measured with iperf between two devices connected by ethernet to the TP-LINKs). Should’ve installed CAT5 when wiring the house :(.

Addendum: the Devolos did not play so well with the TP-LINK network, so I ended up replacing them with some additional TP-LINKs. For the time being, the network seems to run reliably.